[..]
If you can figure out a way to get 18 million legitimate votes on the petitions website, we may have a way out of this crap!
The people in power don't give a damn about petitions. 18, 18 thousand, 18 million, doesn't matter. That site is just a very flimsy facade of pretending to have any consideration for the people they rule.
And "rule" is the right word. The people in power today have much more absolute power than an early medieval monarch. An early medieval monarch's absolutist power was unenforceable and therefore far from absolute in reality. The power of the current authorities is practical and enforceable and restraints on it are increasingly just window-dressing without substance. For example, the IPA gives the government the right to lie in court and forbid their target's legal representatives from questioning the evidence. No doubt May et alia would prefer to do away with trials entirely to cut costs and remove any chance of an acquittal, but it's not
certain that such a move would be allowed today. In years to come it probably will, but probably not right now. Such a move might allow the other party of authoritarians to get into power.
I really didn't think I'd see the day when the UK was one of the most openly authoritarian states in the world. I remember when countries that routinely spied on their own citizens and made extremely broad-ranging ill-defined laws to use against anyone they wanted to target were villified in the UK. Now the UK is one of them and doing it more efficiently than any of the ones in my youth and will only get worse.